(March 24, 2015 at 1:25 pm)Nope Wrote: Do you have a historical example of a benevolent dictator? I find it difficult to believe one ever existed

Remember that for many theists, god personifies good. So all of his actions are good, even if we would otherwise define them as evil, or horrifying, or terrible, or wicked. Therefore, he is a benevolent dictator. And you'd better agree or he'll grab you by the...

...ah, wait. You're referring to someone who would have actually existed. Never mind!

(March 24, 2015 at 1:32 pm)Parkers Tan Wrote:

(March 24, 2015 at 1:08 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote: Ah Winston Churchill. The foreign minister came to see him and Churchill was informed of this while he was sat on the toilet. Churchill told his secretary to tell the foreign minister to come back later as he "could only deal with one shit at a time".

They don't make them like that any more.

And on the other hand, when Churchill was visiting the White House shortly after Pearl Harbor, FDR entered into Churchill's quarters when the latter was fully nude. FDR Immediately apologized and made to leave, where upon Churchill said, "I have nothing to hide from the President of the United States."

While Churchill deserve considerable credit for keeping Great Britain fighting during WWI, his own total unscrupulousness, conceit, and a somewhat concealed but brutal sense of racism certainly makes it difficult to regard him as any sort of hero. The death toll from of callous and vindictively racist policies he followed in the aftermath h of the great Indian femine of 1943, which were swept under the rug in post war accounts, would rank him as one of the great butchers of 20th century. Not quite on the same scale as hitler, stalin and Mao, but certainly just one class below and way ahead of pol pot and other small to mid scale killers.

One could argue even the credit he deserve for keeping britain fighting and thus ultimately emerging on the winning side in WWII is seriously offset by the fact that his own antics in WWI contributed a great deal to the profligate squandering of britain's wealth and resources, lengtheneded of the war, and serious wrong footing of Britain in being able to deal with any serious threat to her after WWI in the first place.

(March 24, 2015 at 1:25 pm)Nope Wrote: Do you have a historical example of a benevolent dictator? I find it difficult to believe one ever existed

There's one in the Roman republic if legend doesn't deviate all too far from the truth. Cincinnatus. But dictator meant something entirely different in the Roman republic than it means today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quin...incinnatus

Before answering such relative question one needs to define benevolent - What is benevolent? Is it merely according to the principles of liberalism and human rights (something that by its very nature doesn't exist)? I would say that benevolent depends on each person's morality. My dad liked living during the dictatorship in Portugal, he genuinely thought the times were better back then, so I guess there's no absolute perspective. Let's look at Mussolini - Was he bad for the opposition? Yeah, but he did help Italy at least in the first years and the population supported him.

My final perspective is that dictatorship V democracy depends on historical and cultural context and thus one cannot be better than the other without taking into account other variables and mentalities. Maybe in 200 years we will be living in dictatorships, but obviously we are limited right now and thus we cannot think ahead of time just like humans before 1748 couldn't predict that something like liberalism would ever exist. And this without mentioning that there are many forms of democracy and dictatorship to make a definitive stance, and possibly in the future new political conceptions will exist

(March 24, 2015 at 1:25 pm)Nope Wrote:

(March 15, 2015 at 8:47 pm)Lek Wrote: Democracies and democratic republics, or any form government for that matter, are only as good as the people who comprise them. If the people of nation are immoral, then they will elect immoral people. I'd rather live under a benevolent dictator than in a corrupt democracy.

Do you have a historical example of a benevolent dictator? I find it difficult to believe one ever existed

That's probably because you don't have a clearly thought out concept of what constitute benevolence. Instead you rely on feelings, which leads you to be over-optimistic about the potency of some favored attributes, and fail to account for the necessity of other disliked attributes under relevant circumstances.

I would say there had been many kings and dictators who left their world better than they found it, and were in the overall scheme of human affair and progress, quite benevolent dictators.

For most of human history, anything but a dictatorship would have been uncompetitive. Therefore anything that is not a dictatorship would result in failure and subjugation of the society. This means nothing but a dictatorship could possibly be benevolent with all effects considered, regardless how individual attributes of any non-dictatorship might appear overwhelmingly attractive to those observing from centuries and thousands of miles removed.

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(March 24, 2015 at 3:03 pm)Dystopia Wrote: Before answering such relative question one needs to define benevolent - What is benevolent? Is it merely according to the principles of liberalism and human rights (something that by its very nature doesn't exist)? I would say that benevolent depends on each person's morality. My dad liked living during the dictatorship in Portugal, he genuinely thought the times were better back then, so I guess there's no absolute perspective. Let's look at Mussolini - Was he bad for the opposition? Yeah, but he did help Italy at least in the first years and the population supported him.

My final perspective is that dictatorship V democracy depends on historical and cultural context and thus one cannot be better than the other without taking into account other variables and mentalities. Maybe in 200 years we will be living in dictatorships, but obviously we are limited right now and thus we cannot think ahead of time just like humans before 1748 couldn't predict that something like liberalism would ever exist. And this without mentioning that there are many forms of democracy and dictatorship to make a definitive stance, and possibly in the future new political conceptions will exist

A benevolence according to some principle likely already overlooks practical impact of "benevolence".

(March 24, 2015 at 4:08 pm)Chuck Wrote:

(March 24, 2015 at 1:25 pm)Nope Wrote: Do you have a historical example of a benevolent dictator? I find it difficult to believe one ever existed

That's probably because you don't have a clearly thought out concept of what constitute benevolence. Instead you rely on feelings, which leads you to be over-optimistic about the potency of some favored attributes, and fail to account for the necessity of other disliked attributes under relevant circumstances.

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(March 24, 2015 at 3:03 pm)Dystopia Wrote: Before answering such relative question one needs to define benevolent - What is benevolent? Is it merely according to the principles of liberalism and human rights (something that by its very nature doesn't exist)? I would say that benevolent depends on each person's morality. My dad liked living during the dictatorship in Portugal, he genuinely thought the times were better back then, so I guess there's no absolute perspective. Let's look at Mussolini - Was he bad for the opposition? Yeah, but he did help Italy at least in the first years and the population supported him.

My final perspective is that dictatorship V democracy depends on historical and cultural context and thus one cannot be better than the other without taking into account other variables and mentalities. Maybe in 200 years we will be living in dictatorships, but obviously we are limited right now and thus we cannot think ahead of time just like humans before 1748 couldn't predict that something like liberalism would ever exist. And this without mentioning that there are many forms of democracy and dictatorship to make a definitive stance, and possibly in the future new political conceptions will exist

A benevolence according to some principle likely already overlooks practical impact of "benevolence".

I would ask instead why is benevolence necessary? Are democracies benevolent? Our laws might be, but democracy in itself is not meant to be benevolent but fair

(March 24, 2015 at 4:15 pm)Dystopia Wrote:

(March 24, 2015 at 4:08 pm)Chuck Wrote: That's probably because you don't have a clearly thought out concept of what constitute benevolence. Instead you rely on feelings, which leads you to be over-optimistic about the potency of some favored attributes, and fail to account for the necessity of other disliked attributes under relevant circumstances.

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A benevolence according to some principle likely already overlooks practical impact of "benevolence".

I would ask instead why is benevolence necessary? Are democracies benevolent? Our laws might be, but democracy in itself is not meant to be benevolent but fair

Why benevolence is necessary depends on what you mean by benevolence.

Democracy itself is a term you can play fast and loose with. I mean we can bracket out direct and representative for brevity and just stick with representative. But democracy doesn't exist in a vacuum; (liberal) democracies are arguably the most globalised and inclusive in the world and have adaptive legislative, executive and judicial structures that adapt as best they can with this. As someone else on here said, 'democracy' has the potential to become a puppet of the majority but that's precisely why there are political safeguards that augment and restrict the general operations of the tiers of structures (and agents) that exist within it (one obvious and easy example being, say, secularism).

There's so much political, social, psychological and economic discourse that goes into running and assessing an entity as confusing and multifaceted as a democracy that simply saying 'it's failed' is parsimonious to the level of being lunacy.

Indeed, there's more than one branch of democracy - We are used to representative democracy but there's other types like direct, semi-direct, centralized, corporatist, etc - Not to mention that in theory ideologies like fascism considered themselves partially democratic because of the representation ingrained in corporations, so it becomes complicated to define democracy. I think some kind of democracy, even if it's just for the elite, will always exist because we need people to voice positions, but I'm not confident that throughout our history and existence we will always use the system of representative democracy - I'm just trying to think ahead of time - And perhaps in the future humans will look at representative democracy with a skeptical mind while technocracy and robotics reigns.

(March 24, 2015 at 4:23 pm)Dystopia Wrote: Indeed, there's more than one branch of democracy - We are used to representative democracy but there's other types like direct, semi-direct, centralized, corporatist, etc - Not to mention that in theory ideologies like fascism considered themselves partially democratic because of the representation ingrained in corporations, so it becomes complicated to define democracy. I think some kind of democracy, even if it's just for the elite, will always exist because we need people to voice positions, but I'm not confident that throughout our history and existence we will always use the system of representative democracy - I'm just trying to think ahead of time - And perhaps in the future humans will look at representative democracy with a skeptical mind while technocracy and robotics reigns.